Hs102

Group-‘B’
Name-Shubham Sanket
Roll-2018241

Liberal arts and Humanities shine in the age of AI

Doctor, engineer, or businessman were the three choices my parents told me I

had for a career when I was growing up, with the third being at the bottom of
the list. Even today, Indian parents dread the thought of their children
becoming musicians or artists; engineering has become the most respected
profession.

Because of the success of startups such as Flipkart and Paytm, parents don’t
freak out as much when they hear that their child is starting a company any
more. But engineering is still considered a prerequisite for success in the
technology industry and this is what parents insist that their children study.

Some of Silicon Valley’s brightest stars aren’t engineers, they are Liberal
Arts and Humanities majors. LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Hoffman, has a
masters in philosophy; YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, majored in history
and literature; Slack’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, in English; Airbnb’s
founder, Brian Chesky, in the fine arts. Even in China, Alibaba’s CEO, Jack
Ma, graduated with a B.A. in English.

Research at Duke and Harvard documented that US technology company

founders tend to be highly educated, 92% holding bachelor’s degrees and
47% holding higher degrees. But just 37% have degrees in engineering or
computer technology, and two percent in mathematics. Their degrees are in
fields as diverse as business, accounting, health care, and arts and the
humanities.

Steve Jobs gave credit for the success of the Mac to a calligraphy course that
he attended. He also highlighted the importance of art and design at the
unveiling of the iPad 2, when he said, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology
alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with
the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and
nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.” With this focus, he
built the most valuable company in the world and set new standards for the
technology industry.

With the convergence of medicine, artificial intelligence, and sensors, we can

create digital doctors that monitor our health and help us prevent disease. We
have the ability to create plants that are drought-resistant and that feed the
planet; with robots powered by artificial intelligence, we can build digital
companions for the elderly.

Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields like biology,

education, health sciences, and human behaviour. Tackling today’s biggest
social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically
about their human context and knowledge of ancient text like Upnishads
plays a major role which is something that humanities graduates happen to be
best trained to do.

An engineering degree is valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from
music, arts, literature, and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A
Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and
the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to
motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who
has worked only in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a
world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.

To create the amazing future that technology is enabling, India needs it musicians and
artists working hand in hand with its engineers. It isn’t exclusively one or the other; it
needs both engineering and the humanities.

The thing that’s going to make artificial intelligence so powerful is it’s

ability to learn and the way AI learns is to look at Human Culture.-DAN
BROWN(American Author).